You may have seen the news today about a group of researchers from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, who recently tracked the movements of 100,000 people using mobile phone signals. Writing in science publication Nature, the team revealed:

Human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterised by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations.

In other words, we get up, go to work and go home again. And we do that a lot: the experiment ran for six months and in that time 75% of the anonymous test subjects remained within a 20 mile radius of their home.

I wondered if people are like this in game worlds...

Not in linear mission-based titles, of course - you sort of have to go with the flow in those. I mean in open environments, in MMORPGs, strategy titles, and sandbox games like GTA and Burnout Paradise. Do we extended our territorial habits to the digital realm?

I certainly do - and always have. In the formative space trading game, Elite, I stuck within a small cluster of planets in the second galaxy - it was a decent mix of industrial and rural markets, I could get away with the odd illegal trade, but there were probably dozens of better areas. I just never looked. On almost every map in Battlefield 1942, there were areas I'd use regularly and areas I hardly ever explored. In GTA IV there are parts of Liberty City I always head to.

It would be interesting, within a realm like WoW or Second Life, or even one of the larger CoD IV maps, to track player movement and match this data to the real-life research. I think there would be correlations. People often make the mistake of thinking games are about complete escapism, but they're not. As Arnie is informed in Total Recall, the one thing that's the same about every holiday you've ever been on is yourself. Whatever virtual kingdom I head into, however alien or outlandish, I'm there. That's unavoidable.

I think only a small percentage of people go into games with the intent to do the opposite of what they do in real-life - and I mean on a fundamental moral level. That is why some people enjoy Manhunter. But, god, the amount of times I set out to be a murdering rampaging tyrant in Civilization II, only to give up a few turns in and almost unconsciously return to my preferred mix or erstwhile scientific research married with a systematic campaign of ostensibly defensive military violence.

When Sony famously referred to PS2 as The Third Place, it meant something mysterious but yet also strangely familiar and comforting. There is no escape from the fact that a majority of us are bound into routines and rhythms of which we are only partially conscious. The same psycho-geography may well exist in games.

Wherever we're going, in some weird unspoken way, we want it to be home.